Don’t get your back up, just back up

Don’t get caught without backup ... User’s of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload who thought they were doing the right thing storing their files on the service would have awoken to find their files inaccessible on January 20. Photo: Reuters

John Davidson

Back-up. Back-up. Back-up. I can’t write that word back-up often enough. Back-up. I could write it every 30 seconds from now back-up until the end of time back-up, and it still back-up wouldn’t be enough. Back-up. Back-up, back-up.

This is the tale of a fat man, a cloud, a shotgun, and a lost weekend. It’s a cautionary tale, with a moral you may have guessed already: back-up. Make copies of your data, all the time, and in as many places as you can – not just on the internet but also on hard disks that you own.

The tale begins last Friday morning, when I awoke to find a database I had been developing for two months had disappeared. Vanished into thin air, or into the internet cloud, which it turns out isn’t as different from thin air as we may like to think.

Though the story could also begin late last year, when the word back-up began to slip from the front of my mind to the back ; when my thoughts on the subject of back-up somehow transmogrified from “I will back that data up right now” to “Gee, I really should back that thing up before something terrible happens”.

The database was part of a project we’re working on here in the Digital Life Labs, which (barring any more catastrophic lapses) will result in a revamped and greatly expanded Digital Life column in coming weeks. (On that subject, stay tuned.)

In the early stages of development, we hosted the database on our own computers, and backed it up to other of our computers zealously. Storage, after all, is cheap – much cheaper than having to start afresh.

But later, to make the database easily available to users outside our network, we moved the database to the cloud, to a database and web hosting company that promised to do regular back-ups for us. Our own back-up habits drifted off . . .

Then came last Friday.

Several things happened that day. Federal prosecutors in the United States closed down the file sharing site Megaupload for copyright violation, replacing its home page with a notice saying the site had been seized pursuant to a court order.

At the same time, police in New Zealand arrested the site’s founder, Kim Dotcom, claiming they found him locked in the safe room of his Auckland mansion with a shotgun in his hands.

While it’s certainly true that Megaupload was used to distribute pirated music, video and software files – I’ve often used Megaupload to download modified versions of phone firmware, for instance, many of which would doubtless infringe upon the phone makers’ copyrights – it’s also true that the site was used for legitimate file storage as well.

Yet the whole site was closed down on Friday, and many Megaupload users who thought they were doing the right thing storing their files on the service would have awoken to find their files inaccessible, replaced by that seizure notice. Whether they’ll ever get them back is unclear. Meanwhile, I awoke on Friday to a disaster of my own. Somehow, all but one of the tables in our database had vanished, along with the data they contained, and the logic associated with the tables. Had we been hacked?

Had one of our apps gone rogue and issued a “drop table” command it was never programmed to issue? Had the service provider accidentally deleted them? It’s still unclear.

The disappearance of the data triggered a mild level of panic here in the Digital Life Labs, which slowly grew into a full-blown panic when it emerged over the next day that the tables had also been dropped from the service provider’s back-ups of the database. How this could happen, when the back-ups were made before the data went missing, is unclear. It’s with good reason it’s known as the cloud: sometimes what happens out there is shrouded in mystery.

In any case, most of the data in the database was lost, and I had to spend much of the weekend figuring out ways to recover it. Some of it I could reconstruct. Some of it is lost for good. None of it would have been lost if we had made constant back-ups of our own, and not just relied on the service provider to do it.

So, the moral of this column is this: back up your files onto your own hard disks. You may think they’re safe out there on the internet, in big data centres with giant diesel generators in the basement, on big file servers that are fastidiously maintained by teams of qualified technicians, but they’re not safe. Not really. Things can happen. Weird things, that you may never have thought likely or even possible.

Federal prosecutors can get a warrant and load your data onto trucks. Tables can get spontaneously deleted, and the deletions can mysteriously travel backwards in time.

Back up. Friday happens every week.

jdavidson@afr.com.au

The Australian Financial Review

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.